Off balance sheet financing (OBF) is either not visible or only partially visible in financial reporting for a number of reasons. It has attracted controversy in the light of its employment in a number of major corporate scandals. Previous investigations dominated by short works and consultancy papers have focused mainly on the financial aspects of OBF. This academic cross-country research on the use of OBF in the UK and US capital markets was undertaken to extend the published analyses to include a legal perspective by studying its legal implications for directors, financial advisers, auditors and financial regulators. The study’s legal focus prompted relying primarily on the doctrinal approach, which was in turn completed by the use of a modified case study in order to help address the how and why issues of the research phenomenon. The study found that OBF instruments are double-edge financial instruments with good and bad consequences. When corporations used OBF for liquidity enhancement or to realise financial savings, they result in positive outcomes. In contrast, when used for aggressive window-dressing or in the manipulation of financial reporting for fraudulent ends, OBF mechanisms generated serious legal liabilities for directors, auditors, and financial advisers in terms of compensation suits or even criminal sanctions. Financial regulators were nonetheless found to be less likely to face legal consequences as a result of current judicial attitudes on the tort of public misfeasance. However, the extensive applications of OBF in conjunction with other forms of creative accounting have resulted in various regulatory responses. On a comparative note, litigation and enforcement actions were found to be relatively more extensive in the US because of the higher incidence of large corporate frauds and the work of regulatory champions especially in New York using deferred prosecution agreements.

Long overshadowed by the subsequent 1960s ‘Boom’, Cuban novels of the 1950s have been confined to the backwater of literary analysis, often grouped together and dismissed as mere social realism like their Spanish counterparts, or described as inferior. The spatial has been similarly overlooked in literary analysis in favour of a focus on stylistic experimentation, narrative structure, characterisation and the temporal. More recently, however, theorists such as Mitchell (1980) and (1989), and Wegner (2002), have argued that literature has become increasingly spatial, and that a greater focus on spatial analysis is needed. Furthermore, conceptions of space in literature have moved from the static notion of ‘setting’ and identification within a specific location and time, to embrace the function of actual physical spaces, whether exterior or interior, public or private, embedded or liminal, juxtaposed, dynamic, static or fluid. One Cuban novel of the 1950s has already been discussed from a spatial perspective - El acoso (1956) by Alejo Carpentier. Using the two previous studies on spatiality in this novel as a starting point (Stanton [1993] and Vásquez [1996]), this analysis expands on the conclusions made by these studies, stressing the importance of water imagery, and demonstrating that spaces in El acoso are essentially dynamic and female-gendered, arguing that the crisis experienced by the acosado is actually one of masculine identity. Building on the expanded analysis of space in El acoso, three lesser-known Cuban novels of the 1950s are then considered from the perspective of space: Los Valedontes (1953) by Alcides Iznaga, Romelia Vargas (1952) by Surama Ferrer, and La trampa (1956) by Enrique Serpa. The socio-economic, political and cultural backcloth for the novels is set out, before an investigation into theories of space, both literary and non-literary, is conducted. Spaces in Los Valedontes reveal that in the rural domain, sexual identities are stable with conventional masculine hegemony virtually uncontested. Spaces in Romelia Vargas demonstrate that in the urban domain, female sexual identity, albeit historically suppressed, triumphs over the traditionally dominant male norm, whilst a study of spaces in La trampa demonstrates that not only are gangsters, policemen and homosexuals shown to occupy particularly challenged positions, but also that constructions of mainstream Cuban masculinity are under threat. The conclusion compares the function of spaces across all four novels, adding new insights into existing theories of literary space where appropriate. This thesis, therefore, tests the hypothesis that the manipulation of space in these novels constitutes material worthy of study, showing that spaces are dynamic and challenging when female-gendered, and constituting a threat to the hegemony exerted by traditional models of masculinity. Spaces in these novels demonstrate how the early part of the 1950s was a period in which an unpredictable array of contested positions was exposed through cultural, racial, gender and sexual stereotypes, leaving conventional norms of identity open to question.

This study investigates the supply, distribution and use of haberdashery wares in England in the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with especial reference to the paired counties of Cumbria and Lancashire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire, Hampshire and West Sussex. A brief comparison is also made with London. Through examination of documentary evidence and extant examples, it aims to set the provision and use of haberdashery for dress into the context of the Early Modern period, and challenges widely held assumptions concerning the availability of wares through the country. The purpose of the argument is firstly to demonstrate that haberdashery, being both a necessity and a luxury, was an important, and historically traceable, part of traded goods in the early modern period, and secondly, with particular reference to the response of retailers to changing needs and demands, to show that the widescale availability of haberdashery for use in dress made it significant in the expression of personal identity and appearance for individuals of all social strata, while its manufacture and distribution provided employment for considerable numbers of people.

The triple coordinates of youth, the Sixties and the Cuban Revolution interact to create a rich but relatively unexplored field of historical research. Previous studies of youth in Cuba have assumed a separation between young people and the Revolution, and either objectify young people as units that could be mobilized by the Revolution, or look at how young people deviated from the perceived dominant ideology of the Revolution. This study contends that, rather than being passive in the face of social and material change, young people in 1960s Cuba were active agents in that change, and played a role in defining what the Revolution was and could become. The model built here to understand young people in 1960s Cuba is based on identity theory, contending that youth identity was built at the point where young people experienced – and were responsible for forging – an emerging dominant culture of youth. The latter entered Cuban consciousness and became, over the course of the 1960s, a part of the dominant national-revolutionary identity. It was determined by three factors: firstly, leadership discourse, which laid out the view of what youth could, should or must be within the Revolution, and also helped to forge a direct relationship between the Revolution and young people; secondly, policy initiatives which linked all youth-related policy to education, therefore linking policy to the radical national tradition stemming from Martí; and thirdly, influence from outside Cuba and the ways in which external youth movements and youth cultures interplayed with Cuban culture. Through these three, youth was in the ascendancy, but, where young people challenged the positive picture of youth, moral panics ensued. Young people were neither inherent saints nor accidental sinners in Cuba in the 1960s, and sought multiple ways in which to express themselves. Firstly, they played their role as activists through the youth organisations, the AJR and the UJC. These young people were at the cutting edge of the canonised vision of youth, and consequently felt burdened by a failure to live up to such an ideal. Secondly, through massive voluntary participation in building the Revolution, through the Literacy Campaign, the militias and the aficionados groups, many young people in the 1960s internalised the Revolution and developed a revolutionary consciousness that defines their generation today. Finally, at the margin of the definition of what was considered revolutionary sat young cultural producers – those associated with El Puente, Caimán Barbudo and the Nueva Trova, and their audience – who attempted to define and redefine what it meant to be young and revolutionary. These groups all fed the culture of youth, and through them we can start to understand the uncertainties of being young, revolutionary and Cuban in this effervescent and convulsive decade.

The introduction, and evolution of securitisation over the years, has made a phenomenal contribution to the area of corporate finance. Securitisation is specialised area which has evolved to deliver considerable advantages to banks and their corporate and government clients, a sub-subjected explored in this thesis. Securitisation is using the cashflow, creditworthiness and collateral of receivables to raise finance from the capital markets. To date, research on the subject of securitisation has produced a few textbooks and numerous articles written by academics and practitioners. The ambit of these writings addresses three questions, namely, what is securitisation; how does it work in practice; and how can securitisation be developed so that it can continue delivering advantages in the evolving world of corporate finance. Securitisation is very much a practical subject, and given that the author had very little, if any, practical exposure to the subject prior to developing this thesis, the author, admittedly, felt challenged to ascertain significant issues that could be developed to the extent that such development represents an original contribution to knowledge. Case law in the US had already explored the most significant issue regarding securitisation, namely, true sale. Armed with a solid theoretical base of knowledge that author looked for inspiration, and discovered it during the initial days when the Enron scandal hit the headlines. In short, the Enron scandal involved using the concept of securitisation to facilitate financial crime. The masterminds (if its appropriate to use such description) of the scandal, as this thesis will unfold later, cleverly used thousands of securitisation and hedging transactions to raise funds in order to give financial creditability to a giant corporation which on the surface appeared prosperous but, in reality, was breathing to a large extent on borrowed funds. This scandal, in which securitisation was used, inspired the author to develop the originality of the thesis by focusing on the issue of securitisation and financial crime. Given that financial crime is a huge area to explore, the author narrowed the focus to look at money laundering, and address the question: can the practice of securitisation facilitate money laundering? To approach this question and answer it at doctorate level required a solid understanding of what securitisation is and how it works in practice. Using textbooks, articles and conversations with practitioners, the thesis documents under Part 1, what securitisation is and how it works in practice before moving on to Part 2 to look at if and how securitisation can facilitate money laundering.

For many years, government backed reports have continued to deplore the poor performance of the construction industry with many projects failing to exceed or live up to the expectations of clients. There is a common belief that the culture of the construction industry is one of the factors that has an impact on its performance. The culture of the construction industry at the project level is often associated with such attributes as fragmentation, antagonism, mistrust, poor communication, short-term mentality, blame culture, casual approaches to recruitment, machismo and sexism. These attributes are in turn associated with project outcomes like litigation, poor health and safety performance, and inferior quality. Whilst such associations are helpful to the extent that they focus attention on the failings of the industry, and point to aspects that need to be improved, they are arbitrary and often based on no more than anecdotal evidence, and as such do not provide a systematic basis for assessing the real impact of culture on performance. This research was thus undertaken to look for empirical evidence of a relationship between cultural orientations and project performance outcomes. Adopting social cognitive theory and defining culture as the unique configuration of solutions – embodied in attitudes, behaviours and conditions – that a construction project organisation and its members adopt in dealing with problems at the project level, a quantitative research methodology was employed in investigating the culture within the project coalition, also referred to in this thesis as the construction project organisation (CPO). CPOs were profiled to determine their cultural orientations. Several project performance indicators were also assessed and the relationships between these performance measures and the cultural orientations were examined. Analysis revealed five principal dimensions of culture along which project organisations differ. These dimensions are workforce orientation, performance orientation, team orientation, client orientation and project orientation. With the exception of performance and client orientation, the other dimensions of culture were found to be significantly associated with project performance outcomes. These associations were modelled using multiple regression, and from these models it can be inferred inter alia that projects with higher workforce orientation have better participant satisfaction and innovation and learning outcomes. Projects with higher team orientation have better participant satisfaction and health & safety and quality outcomes. Likewise projects with higher project orientation have better health & safety and quality outcomes. Although causality cannot be assumed, these findings support the thesis that culture matters. It is therefore recommended that project participants – and in particular contractors, devote more effort and resources towards improving the orientations of their CPOs in respect of the dimensions of culture identified as having significant association with project performance outcomes, particularly workforce, team and project orientations.

The present research sought to describe and explain age related changes to associative learning processes. Eleven experiments were conducted using a human conditional learning paradigm. Background data on health, lifestyle, and cognitive ability were collected and used as predictor variables in multiple regression analyses. Experiments 1 to 8 were formative, and found that older participants showed an overall age related decline in learning ability exacerbated by the number of stimuli and outcomes used, and the concurrent presentation of different problem types. Configural models of learning (e.g. Pearce, 1994, 2002) best predicted young participants’ learning whereas older people’s learning was more consistent with elemental models (e.g. Rescorla-Wagner, 1972), suggesting an age related change in generalisation processes. Those who learned problems better were also more likely to be able to articulate a rule that had helped them learn the problem. Age itself was the most predominant predictor of accuracy in these experiments. Experiments 9, 10, and 11 were multiple stage experiments that looked at the extent of pro- and retro-active interference in learning. Experiments 9 and 10 used easy and hard HCL problems to examine the role of rule induction in learning. Older participants who had learned initial discriminations better were more prone to pro-active interference in both experiments, the extent of which was predicted most reliably by fluid intelligence. Rule learning had a profound effect on participants’ predictions during the unreinforced test stage. In Experiment 9 (Easy-Hard) younger participants suffered from more retroactive interference than older people. This pattern was far less pronounced in Experiment 10, (Hard-Easy) suggesting that problem order affected the way participants generalised from rule-based knowledge. This observation is inexplicable by associative learning theories, and explanation may require a problem solving approach. Experiment 11 examined feature-based generalisation. Again older participants suffered more proactive and retroactive interference and elemental theories predicted their responses best, whereas younger participants responses were consistent with configural models of learning. In this instance, resistance to pro- and retro-active interference was predicted by fluid intelligence. Overall the research concluded that there is a demonstrable, complexity dependent change in associative learning processes in later life. It appears that humans have an increasing tendency to rely on elemental, rather than configural processes of generalisation in later life, and this leads to overgeneralisation between stimuli and an inability to resist pro- and retroactive interference in learning. This may be as a result of an inhibitory or source monitoring failure as a consequence of atrophy in the frontal lobes of the brain, although some of the learning deficits are explicable through mnemonic decline.

This longitudinal study set out to improve the retention and achievements of diverse students on computing courses in one wide access university, firstly by early identification of students at risk of poor performance and secondly by developing and implementing an intervention programme. Qualitative data were obtained using the ASSIST questionnaire, by focus group discussions and an open-ended questionnaire on students’ experiences of the transition to higher education (HE). Quantitative data on student characteristics and module results were obtained from Registry. Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS version 10. The study comprised two phases where phase one sought to enable the early detection of students at risk of poor performance by investigating the data set for patterns that may emerge between student achievement at Level 1 and entrance qualification, feeder institution, approaches to learning, conceptions of learning, course and teaching preferences and motivation. Phase one findings showed a trend of poorer performance by students who entered computing courses in HE with an AVCE entrance qualification. It was also shown that mature students scored more highly on the deep approach scale compared to their younger counterparts. Phase two investigated the data set for patterns that may emerge between student achievement at Level 2 and entrance qualification, approaches to learning, conceptions of learning and course and teaching preferences. Phase two, using action research, also sought to develop an intervention programme from the findings. This intervention programme was designed to improve aspects of information delivery to students; the personal tutor system, assessment régimes, Welcome Week, and teaching and learning. Piloting, evaluation and refinement of the intervention programme brought changes that were seen as positive by both staff and students. These changes included the Welcome Week Challenge which involved students in activities that sought to enhance students’ interactions with peers, personal tutors and the school and university facilities. These findings have shown that, for staff in wide access HE institutions, some knowledge of the previous educational experiences of their students, and the requirements of those students, are vital in providing a smooth transition to HE. A model of the characteristics of a successful student on computing courses in HE and a model for enhanced retention of diverse students on computing courses in HE were developed from the research findings. These models provide a significant contribution to current knowledge of those factors that enhance a smooth transition to HE and the characteristics of a successful student in a wide access university.

Evidence seems to suggest that with 14 years of unbroken economic growth, the UK’s construction and building services sector is experiencing severe skills crisis of between 40 – 50 per cent retention rate and declining numbers of entrant trainees. More importantly, the level of this severity varies with sub regional and regional peculiarities. To date, most studies on this area have focused on increasing the population of the existing pools of labour rather than harnessing existing ones. Adopting the concept of multiskilling, current techniques of evaluating skills crisis were critically reviewed. While there has been some empirically beneficial application of this concept in the US, it is a rarity in the literature to find previous works on multiskilling in UK’s construction and building services sector. Adopting an action research approach, a Project Steering Group of industry stakeholders served as a research ‘think tank’ for validating empirical results, and in line with the theory of construct validity, instruments of survey were designed and operationalized in a pilot and major surveys of supply and demand sides’ target groups. Employing the relative index ranking technique, the forecast implications of UK’s economic stability are ‘real’ and a demand led system is prescribed as a tentative ‘cushion’ for sustainable but immediate redress. A time series data for the period 1961 – 2004 is explored and systematised quantitative demand led models for evaluating construction output based on aggregated and disaggregated manpower attributes are developed using principal component regression (PCR). Aggregating these models, it is deduced that multiskilling could help redress skills shortage in the long term. A new trade equilibrium framework and a multiskilled focused partnership in training programme are prescribed with response strategies and recommendations.

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterised by excessive production of tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα). This leads to rheumatoid cachexia, a condition characterised by increased resting energy expenditure (REE) and loss of fat-free mass (FFM) leading to functional disability, decreased strength and balance. The aims of this research work was to: a) to develop a new REE equation in order to continuously monitor abnormal changes in REE in the RA population, b) to investigate if smoking further enhances hypermetabolism and c) to examine if the new anti-TNFα medication reverses this metabolic abnormality. Methods: 68 patients with RA were assessed for demographic and anthropometrical characteristics, REE (indirect calorimetry), body composition (bioelectrical impedance), and disease activity [C-reactive protein (CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), disease activity score 28 (DAS28) and health assessment questionnaire (HAQ)]. 20 of the total 68 patients, about to start anti-TNFα therapy, underwent the exact same aforementioned procedures but on three separate occasions (Baseline: two weeks prior to anti-TNFα treatment, Time-1 and Time-2: two weeks and three months, respectively, after the drug had been introduced. Results: Study 1: Based on FFM and CRP, a new equation was developed which had a prediction power of R2=0.76. The new equation revealed an almost identical mean with measured REE (1645.2±315.2 and 1645.5±363.1 kcal/day, p>0.05), and a correlation coefficient of r=0.87 (p=0.001). Study 2: Smokers with RA demonstrated significantly higher REE (1513.9±263.3 vs. 1718.1±209.2 kcal/day; p=0.000) and worse HAQ (1.0±0.8 vs. 1.7±0.8; p=0.01) compared to age and FFM matched RA non-smokers. The REE difference was significantly predicted by the interaction smoking/gender (p=0.04). Study 3: Significant increases were observed in REE (p=0.002), physical activity (p=0.001) and protein intake (p=0.001) between the three times of assessment. Moreover, disease activity significantly reduced [ESR (p=0.002), DAS28 (p=0.000), HAQ (p=0.000) and TNFα (p=0.024)] while FFM and total body fat did not change (both at p>0.05). Physical activity and protein intake were found to be significant within-subject factors for the observed REE elevation after 12-weeks on anti-TNFα treatment (p=0.001 and p=0.024, respectively). Conclusions: Findings from the first study revealed that the newly developed REE equation provides an accurate prediction of REE in RA patients. Moreover, the results from the second study showed that cigarette smoking further increases REE in patients with RA and has a negative impact on patients’ self-reported functional status. Finally, our data from the third study suggest that REE remains elevated not because of the maintenance of the RA-related hypermetabolism but due to the concomitant significant increases in physical activity and protein intake.

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